


Consumed my Waking Days

by sorcerous_encampment



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/M, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5169053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorcerous_encampment/pseuds/sorcerous_encampment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Columbia Prep’s it couple are on a break, the Schuyler sisters are in a band, and Gil Lafayette’s having a blow-out party across the river in Jersey -- Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton are bound to go toe to toe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consumed my Waking Days

As the city opened up onto the glimmering Hudson, and the forest in the distance, Angelica thumbed through the notifications on her phone. There was Alex on Twitter, linking to the latest outrage about airport security, the latest outrage with USCIS, and she was torn between wishing she were there with him for one of those four-hour intense conversations and being glad that instead she was traveling up to the Catskills to spend the summer at her family’s place.

It was the first time she’d truly regretted leaving the city for the summer. The greatest city in the world, sometimes -- when you were young and had money, when the city was music and theater, protests and book signings and shopping and trips to Central Park and Coney Island fueled by neverending iced coffees.

And her boyfriend.

And Alex, though maybe it was for the best that she wouldn’t see him till September.

She should be there for him, she thought. Aaron had used a family connection to hook him up with a PR internship at a nonprofit in Washington Heights. Could lead to big things for him if he played his cards right -- if he didn’t keep shooting off at the mouth -- God, she hated this, always worrying what trouble he was going to get himself into without her. She wanted to think she didn’t have to.

Alex had brains and guts and knew how to do what it took to survive. Brought to New York at twelve after his mother died, living in a 1-bedroom in Washington Heights with a father who was barely around. Got a scholarship to Columbia Prep thanks to a guidance counselor -- a Mr. Washington -- who’d pulled every string he could find for him. Not that it was easy being a spiky, nerdy immigrant kid at a school that cost more than his father’s whole salary.

Still.

If it weren’t for Aaron, and that internship, she might’ve begged her mother and father to let him stay in the Catskills with them.

Maybe things would be better between the three of them in September. Not as tense, not as weird.

She thumbed her phone again and the icon kept circling around uselessly. They were off the main road now and reception was patchy. Peggy and Eliza were singing along to something on the car stereo and Angelica, putting her phone and her worries aside for a moment, joined her harmonies with theirs.

Summer.

_Feminism is for Everybody_ , _This Bridge Called My Back_ , Zora Neale Hurston, Megan Abbot, Natsuo Kirino, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Austen and Brontës, Rita Williams-Garcia.

Hiking and canoeing (and one horseback trail ride -- Peggy, the youngest at fourteen, was still very fond of horses).

For the first time, a tiny splash of wine with dinner, sometimes, which attracted much jealousy and indignation from the younger Schuylers.

She’d talk with Aaron some nights, when she could get bars on her phone, but she kept finding herself getting too excited about something she was reading, going off on a tear, and he’d just chuckle at her. She was “intense,” he said, and she didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Texting was easier -- little ice-cream-cone hearts, little less-than-threes, floating between upstate and downstate.

A week and a half in, they were bored enough to break out their X-Box and the plastic Rock Band instruments, and practiced until the Red Ring of Death pronounced the thing dead.

“Daddy would get us a new one,” Peggy said, sulking at the hardware. Angelica hesitated, torn between really wanting to finally pass “Beast and the Harlot” on expert and increasingly aware that her family might occasionally go over the line from “well-off” to “downright spoiled.”

“Is this what we really want to do with our summer?” Eliza asked. “Mash down plastic keys to get the high score on a game?”

“We can’t go canoeing again,” Peggy said. “It’s raining for the next three days.”

“It’s not that,” Eliza said quietly. “You know how Uncle Steve still has that drum kid from when he was in a funk band? And -- if Daddy asks around we might find someone with a used guitar or bass, and even if we don’t I have some money left over from my birthday -- Ange, you’re good at music --”

“I’m first chair violin,” Angelica said. “That means I don’t have time to play anything that isn’t --” She pulled up the PDF the orchestra teacher had posted of what they were supposed to be practicing over the summer. “Bach, Shostakovich, Messiaen.”

“In September you’ll be first chair violin! But -- just, we’re so lucky to be here right now, with all the time in the world, with no neighbors close enough to yell at us for making too much noise. So let’s have a rock band. Tell me you haven’t wanted to be in a rock band.”

Angelica Schuyler, straight-A student, first chair violin, destined for a slot at an Ivy and then maybe law school, which meant that all her rebellions were minor and she was political in ways that annoyed only her boyfriend. She had never before this moment thought of being in a rock band but the moment that Eliza suggested it she wanted it desperately.

And Peggy, after a few moments of thought, realized that real drums were bound to be both harder and a great deal more fun to bang on than fake plastic ones; and thus, The Schuyler Sisters came into existence as what would be a three-piece just as soon as they got to Uncle Steve’s house and the Guitar Center in Albany. (Dad had to go there on a business trip anyway, something with the state government.)

Dad mentioned, as they loaded the drum kit into the SUV, getting lessons from someone in Woodstock, but Angelica somehow kept forgetting to call the numbers she found on the internet, tired of having him smooth out all the rough spots in her path; there was something about it being just the three of them, just YouTube tutorials and books from the library, trial and error and error and error. All of them in the garage, amps plugged into extension cords, pounding away at unsteady chord changes. Eliza’s high sweet voice singing things Angelica grabbed from her Twitter feed, anxiety and unrest, everything wrong with the world delivered in sound bites to her phone.

“That’s your ring tone!” Eliza yelled as the echo of the last chords died out.

Angelica could just hear it; these instruments were loud, they had to turn the amps down, they had to practice with ear plugs in.

“HELLO,” she said into the phone.

“I can hear you, Angie, you don’t have to yell,” Aaron said.

“I --”

“I’ve called you five times!”

“I didn’t hear my phone ring.” She wanted to say: Aaron, I’m spending the summer with my family, I can’t pick up the phone and spend twenty minutes making smoochy noises into the phone when I’m visiting my cousins. Aaron, I have voicemail, I have a “missed call” thing on my phone, you don’t have to call me five times hoping I’ll pick up eventually. She did not say these things. And she did not say that all she could hear was the bass and the guitar and the drums; she hadn’t told Aaron about any of this. (Nor Alex, for that matter, though they emailed each other rarely enough that it seemed like a natural omission, and not something she was deliberately hiding.)

“I keep feeling like you’re checked out, Ange.”

“I can’t be an attentive girlfriend from three hours away. It’s not like I asked to be here.”

“Do you even miss me up there?”

“Of course I do,” she said, and didn’t know it was a lie until she said it -- fond of him, yes, fond of the time they’d spent together, the first boy she’d ever _wanted_ right down to the blood in her veins, but there was something about being upstate that was like the sky had lifted. Not just the fresh air, not just the lake water, but a feeling that she was allowed to exist, just as she was.

They traded olive branches, made all the required apologies, ended the phone call saying “I love you” and “I love you too” and making vague plans for whenever she got back into town.

Two days later she called Aaron to tell him she needed a break. It would be easier once she was back in town. They’d be able to have a real conversation about their relationship, not just circle around the same arguments until Angelica’s phone sounded a quiet “mrp” to signal that it had lost reception. Aaron didn’t say much except “Okay,” but when she checked her email that night -- after her sisters had tried to distract her with a bike ride to the store for ingredients, and then a cookie-baking party -- she had three missives from Aaron about his feelings. And one email from Alex. He didn’t write that often but when he did it was pages and pages with hardly a paragraph break -- he was angry that he’d been stopped and frisked twice just walking to his internship, he was angry that he owed fifteen dollars and change on his library card and couldn’t check out any more books until he paid it down, he was angry that nobody at his internship was taking him seriously because he wasn’t one of these white kids who skied in Vermont every winter.

And she wasn’t even surprised that he started off the email with “My dearest, Angelica,” because he loved that old-fashioned playful-flirty stuff. You could tell he didn’t mean it because if he meant it he would say “bae” or something -- like he used to call John Laurens -- Angelica, you’re overthinking things, she told herself. You always overthink everything.

Still. That comma after “dearest.”

She did not want to tell him about the thing with Aaron, and she did not want to tell him about the music -- it still seemed a little like a frivolity, a whim, the kind of thing bored rich teenagers did on their summer vacations -- she wrote back about the books she was reading, and about the time their canoe had flipped over. (She sent along the picture of her and Eliza, drenched from head to toe in lake water, pulling the canoe out of the water).

Later, she kept thinking about the comma, and Alexander who had snuck a book out of the library in his backpack because of that library fine, and she mailed him a stack of cookies in a plastic container with a $20 on top, which she continued to feel weird about until she got the selfie of him with just those intent eyes peering over a stack of six books with NYPL stickers on them. (And a hamburger, off to one side). She felt unsettled even then, and spent her evenings picking out songs of vague yearning on her guitar, and her nights not sleeping much.

Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School was housed in a couple of adjoining buildings on 93rd and 94th Street, facing right onto the sidewalk without much of a schoolyard for the upper schoolers to gather before the first bell. Angelica, Peggy, and Eliza had carved out their own territory -- taking a small detour to walk up through Central Park to the school, where the visual attractions included a reliable stream of shirtless joggers (until it got too cold) and an even more reliable stream of dogs bouncing over the grass after tennis balls. And then they’d stand at the lamppost at 93rd street, wait for Aaron and Alexander to show up, and let Alexander get at least his first monologue of the day over with before they headed to class.

On that hot September morning, first day of the school year, Alex was already waiting by the lamppost by the time the Schuylers got there, in new leather shoes and with a backpack at his feat, loaded down with at least four books, and coming apart at the corners.

“Alexander,” Angelica said, her heart lifting with an unexpected tenderness -- as if all this time she’d been bracing herself for something awful to have happened to him.

She moved in for a hug and he put his arm out, squeezing her shoulder, holding her at a distance.

For two minutes they compared class schedules, traded rumors about which teachers were great and which ones were super strict. When Aaron showed up she didn’t know how to feel -- it was so easy to kiss him when he leaned over her, so easy to pretend that nothing had happened, and still it felt like something that was squeezing at her heart.

They walked to class with Aaron holding Angelica’s hand and bragging over the success of Alex’s internship as if he’d been personally responsible for plucking Alex from poverty and obscurity -- he’d increased readership of the organization’s blog and twitter feed by twenty percent over the summer.

“He just wouldn’t stop writing,” Aaron said, with some mix of admiration and outrage. “Jay wrote a couple of posts for the blog, and so did Madison, but -- Hamilton wrote the other fifty-one!”

Alex looked proud and embarrassed at once, and pointed at his shoes. “Finally replaced my ratty Vans with my stipend, too.”

“So what did you do all summer? More pony rides?”

Angelica noticed the confusion that passed over Alex’s face. She did not want to talk to him about this. “Reading, mostly. And music. That Shostakovich we’re playing is going to be murder.”

“She flipped over a canoe,” Alex said.

Cold silence fell over them as Aaron realized that Alex knew more about Angelica’s summer than he did, and Alex realized that maybe it was the wrong thing to say.

“That was Peggy’s fault,” Angelica said. “She threw our balance off.”

For the rest of the trip to class, she couldn’t escape the feeling that the balance between the three of them had been upset, too, in some way she didn’t know how to right.

 

The first thing Peggy said that afternoon, once Aaron and Alexander and her friends and Eliza’s friends had all peeled off the group to make their own ways home, was “I got us a gig.”

“Wait, what?”

“You know how Gil Lafayette’s folks have that big place in Jersey?”

“Right,” Angelica said.

“His birthday party is next Saturday. And his dad had hired Palma Violets to play the party, but then Gil got upset because he wanted a BMW Z4 for his birthday and his dad only got him a 228, and so his dad called him a spoiled ungrateful so-and-so and if he wanted music at his party he would have to hook the iPad up to the stereo system.” Peggy paused for air. “So he was asking around to see if anyone knew a band who would play for cheap on short notice.”

“Peggy,” Angelica said warily, “We’re not actually… what you might call... good.”

“We don’t have to be!” Peggy said. “If we play bad loud music that pisses off his dad, we’ll have fulfilled our mission. And we get paid.”

“It’s too soon,” Eliza said. “We need -- everything. A set list, some kind of better equipment setup. We need clothes.”

“I already talked to Hercules Mulligan,” Peggy said breezily. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Hercules Mulligan from your _home ec_ class?”

“Eliza, this is Columbia Prep. We don’t have home ec, we have Creative Textile Arts. And he made a fucking amazing pair of pants. Also he’ll help us carry our gear.”

Hercules was not actually his real name; he was a legendary jock, star of varsity ice hockey in last year’s season, the guy who had caught a 200-pound book cart in mid-air just before it fell on a lower school kid, the guy who carried Peggy on his back to the school nurse’s office when she fell down a flight of stairs and twisted her ankle. Even at a school like Columbia Grammar and Prep -- all the tolerance and inclusiveness you could buy for $45,000 a year -- a man might be worried about admitting that he loved fashion design as much as Hercules Mulligan did. Hercules Mulligan, though, was untouchable.

Peggy flicked through her phone’s gallery and pulled up evidence of these amazing pants.

“We’ve been back at school for a day and already you’ve arranged a gig, a roadie, and a costume designer,” Angelica said, slowly warming to the idea. “Nicely done, Peggy!”

“There’s just one thing,” Peggy said. “We need a better name than The Schuyler Sisters Band.”

This was a thing that Angelica had been thinking about since the first time they’d made it through “Bad Moon Rising” without getting out of tempo with each other. She kept thinking of how Alex had started calling her A-dot-Sky, when she told him that she hated anyone but her sisters to call her Ange or Angie -- and then for a while it had been the three of them like that, A-dot-Sky, A-dot-Ham, A-dot-Burr. Alex was calling her Angelica now, as if that casual intimacy -- arms around each other’s shoulders, hands in each other’s hair -- was nothing they could ever get back.

“Starry Skies,” she said.

“Spelled s-c-h-u-y-s?”

“Just regular skies. Or else everyone will be pronouncing it ‘shoes.’”

They spent a few minutes thinking up different adjectives to put in front of “skies,” and ended up giggling over “Vaguely Ominous Skies” and “Strangely Glowing Skies,” but Angelica carried the day.

They committed themselves to hardcore practicing (carried out mostly in a rented warehouse in Brooklyn, or with Peggy playing as quietly as she could on a set of plastic drum practice pads) as Angelica kept scribbling one draft after another of lyrics.

“There’s an amazing new Singaporean place in the Village,” Aaron said on Friday, over lunch.

“We should go sometime,” Angelica said without looking up from the score she was studying. The orchestra teacher had noticed that she had, perhaps, not done _quite_ as much work as she should have on the Shostakovich over the summer.

“We should go tonight. My treat.”

“Oh,” Angelica said, wincing. “I already promised my sisters I’d do something with them.”

“Your sisters, right, you don’t get to spend nearly enough time with them,” Aaron said under his breath. And then he smiled, and said “Sorry,” and turned back to his charming self. “Okay, will you go with me to Gil Lafayette’s party on Saturday?”

She nodded slowly. “I _am_ planning on going, but…”

She should have told him, she should have told him, and now it was so late that it seemed like she’d been lying all this time. “The band Lafayette hired for the party is, well, it’s me and my sisters.”

“You’re a band.”

“Yes.”

“Since when? How did this happen?”

“It was Eliza’s idea and I was tired of Shostakovich.”

(This was impossible, she would never be tired of Shostakovich. But tired of the narrowness of her own life, tired of never letting herself be wild and silly. Tired of Aaron, even if she hadn’t been able to put it into words at first.)

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked very reasonably.

“I don’t know,” Angelica said. “I tried to and then I didn’t know how to without making it look like a thing I was choosing over you. And then I thought -- I’m writing lyrics about all the stuff that I’m angry about, all the stuff that all of us _should_ be outraged about, and -- I could almost hear you telling me that this wasn’t the way to get ahead.”

She pushed her notebook across the table at him and then sat, arms crossed, staring him down, unable to figure out what she hoped for anymore. Whether he could accept the person she actually was, whether she even wanted him to.

“You like Alexander,” Aaron said.

Angelica continued staring him down, somewhat more intensely.

“Alex is my friend. And yours, I thought.”

“This is what girls do, when they like a guy. Pick up his taste in music and his political opinions.”

“I’m not allowed to have opinions if someone else had them first?”

“Not ones that are stupid enough that you should be able to see through them!”

Angelica stood up so suddenly that her chair clattered backward. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, that one of her teachers had gotten up from the staff table and was making her way in their direction, and resisted the urge to dump her water bottle out on Aaron’s head.

“I agreed to play a gig and I’m not going to back out of it. Maybe stay home, if you don’t want to listen.”

She stalked off with her dignity intact, but not for long -- and the worst of it was when she passed Alex in the hall, and her eyes suddenly welled up, and she saw his whole face go soft with concern. All she could do was put on a fake smile, say “Don’t worry about it,” brush past him like a person who didn’t want to be followed.

She waited until he was out of earshot, and then quietly said, “Your stupid comma.”

You do not let yourself get distracted by these things. Angelica’s first boyfriend broke up with her the day before a violin recital when she was in middle school, and she carried on. She had almost complete faith that either Alex would blow off the party altogether (he was friends with Lafayette and Hercules, but he hated feeling like the charity case at parties) or Aaron would, and anyway, she couldn’t fix that -- she could fix the tricky bit in the guitar solo in the song about Edward Snowden, so she worked on that, and tried to ignore the rest.

Saturday she and Eliza were in the bathroom, trying out their brightest eyeshadows, when her phone tinged.

Alex : > Angelica can I get a ride with u to Short Hills? Turns out there’s no bus, lol rich people.

Alex : > But is Aaron going with you becuz if so I can get a ride w somebody else

Angelica : > Yes but we’re leaving early with Hercules M, can you be here by 6?

Angelica : > No Aaron today, idk if he’s coming

Alex : > ???

Angelica : > Yeah

Angelica : > Um

Angelica : > I don’t really want to get into it rn but you should come over

Angelica : > Because we are getting dressed up and it’s great

She realized, after pressing ‘Send,’ that this probably sounded more indecent than she had originally intended. Well. Fair enough payback for the comma thing.

He showed up in almost exactly the amount of time it took to get from Washington Heights to the Upper West Side on the subway, on a good day; he took one look at Angelica, who was dressed in a coral-colored dress that somehow managed to look both Baroque and punk rock, and who was dusted with glitter on her eyelids and around her collarbone.

“I kind of think you need a hug,” he said, “but I don’t want to ruin that whole -- thing -- you’ve got going on.”

“Jedi hug,” Angelica said, opening her arms and trying to keep steady.

“Jedi hug,” he said back to her. “What’s all this about, anyway?”

“We’re in a band. We’re playing at the party.”

“You’re in a band!” There was this look on his face like he was a little amazed, a little delighted. And just like that she knew what she needed from Aaron, what he hadn’t been able to give her.

“It’s kind of -- like, don’t expect too much, okay?” She tried to laugh it off.

“You have never failed to impress me,” Alex said gallantly, at which point Angelica decided there was a fair chance she would break into tears right there, so she said “I have to do my hair” and went into the bathroom.

“I thought her hair was done,” Alex said.

“You don’t understand the mystery of a girl’s beauty routines,” Eliza said.

With the bathroom door closed between them they had a shouted conversation about Donald Trump, until Hercules showed up, and they loaded all the necessary gear into his mom’s SUV. Peggy called shotgun, which left Angelica in the middle back seat squeezed up against Alex.

It was one small oasis of Nice in all the turmoil of wondering what she was going to do about Aaron and how she was going to get through this show and how much she could tell Alex while still keeping her cool. The sun was low in the sky when they crossed the bridge across the Hudson, his face against the window lit up with gold light. It was rare to see him like this, still, almost content. Even wearing a badly-fitting suit, even smelling of Axe Body Spray, there was something behind his eyes that made her recall when they’d met, the first day of ninth grade, when the school counselor had assigned her (a Columbia student since kindergarten) to show the new kid around, and she’d marched him dutifully around to the cafeteria and the library and the computer lab but froze when he asked her name.

She had always loved him. No question of that. But it was a love that had her inviting him to her house for dinner because he needed to eat something besides Takis, that had them doing their homework together every afternoon because even with Alexander’s brain there was a big step up from public middle school math classes to Columbia Prep, that had her talking him down every time he felt his honor had been injured -- an anxious feeling that crowded out every other kind of love, a desperate wish to protect him from the world and from himself. She’d been happy for him, genuinely happy, when he’d started going out with John Laurens, because he could bear some of that weight for her; but then by the time his family moved to South Carolina and they broke up, she was already dating Aaron. She never thought of it as some awful pining thing, just a plain solid gladness to have him as a friend and an ardent hope that he would fight past everything standing in his way. But love is love; it persists.

Almost as soon as they arrived at Lafayette’s place in Short Hills the Schuyler sisters and Hercules were busy setting up sound equipment and tuning instruments. Alex stayed with them a while, to help, but he kept getting in the way. “Go, enjoy yourself at the party,” Eliza said to him, for the third time.

He could do the first of those, at least.

It was still early, and the people at the party were people he didn’t know or people he already disliked -- except for Lafayette, who had barely started a conversation with him when he got distracted answering the door for more guests.

He contemplated the fraction of people who he both knew and liked at Columbia Prep; after Hercules and Lafayette and the Schuylers, and a couple of teachers who put up with his flagrant smartassery, there weren’t many left. This train of thought did nothing to put him in a better mood, and neither did the beer he poured himself just to give his hands something to do. The music on the stereo was terrible generic indie-folk stuff, the kind of music with banjos on it but in an ironic way.

“A-dot-Ham!”

Alexander looked up from where he had been studying the Lafayettes’ bookshelves.

“A-dot-Burr,” he replied dubiously. Aaron had rarely been very friendly with him except when he was doing it for Angelica’s sake. “I didn’t think that you would make it.”

“What did Angelica tell you?”

“That she didn’t want to get into it.”

Aaron smiled slightly at that.

“I thought you two told each other everything.”

“Not everything. Though Peggy and Eliza are around if you want to interrogate them.”

Aaron got himself a drink of sangria and sipped on it, leaning against the counter of the wet bar. The light was dim. Around them, couples kissed, flirted, touched hands to arms. There was a hideous feedback noise, and then Peggy saying “Sorry!”

“Listen, Alex, might not be my place to intrude --”

“So don’t.”

“I know she’s sweet to you, but you’re better off not taking that too seriously.”

“Never have.”

“She is exactly like every trust fund girl who’s perfectly happy to slum around with some poor kid who can give her ideals. For a while. For fun.”

Alex looked at him for a while, eyes narrowed. “You want to take that back?”

“Not particularly.”

It wasn’t anything that Alex hadn’t told himself before, a dozen times, a hundred times. Not because he distrusted Angelica, but because he knew what reality looked like. Reality looked like his mother dying in a hospital bed, like a hurricane flooding the streets of his hometown, like his boyfriend getting shipped off to a South Carolina boarding school. Full of moments of kindness, but none of them dependable.

A crunch and fuzz of guitars flooded the room. Alex turned toward the makeshift stage, trying to push Aaron out of his head and listen.

Angelica was right; they were not very good.

But they were magic.

Live music could do that sometimes, even when it was bad. There’s a moment when the singer’s eye holds you; there’s a moment when you feel like there’s nobody in the room but you, all of the intensity of the music radiating through the air and hitting only you. There was Angelica’s look of fierce concentration, the beads of sweat on her collarbone that glittered when the light hit her.

They played fast and hard and when Eliza sang about injustice Alex could just about forget that injustice wasn’t something she had all that much personal experience with.

It was over before he knew it.

(There was some applause for an encore, if only out of politeness, but Angelica yelled from behind the stage “That’s all we can play unless you want an awful cover of Bad Moon Rising!”)

He turned and Aaron was staring daggers at him.

“What did you tell her to turn her against me?”

It might have been the beers (three, by now), the music, or merely the fact that he had completely lost every ounce of patience he’d ever had for Aaron Burr.

Alex did not have it in him to hold back.

“If she has a problem with you, that’s because of you, not me!”

“And I’m supposed to think she likes you on your merits, you arrogant, obnoxious --”

“From the _moment_ you two started going out you were convinced I was plotting to seduce her away from you. While I had a boyfriend! Do you really think that jealousy was a turn-on for her?”

Aaron dropped his voice lower. “I think I was right about how little I could trust her.”

Everything got very quiet, all at once. “Say that one more time,” Alexander said, and it came out louder than he meant, but he took a breath, waited. “Say that one more time!”

Summer heat, sweat, adrenaline.

The people milling around the room seemed to draw to the edges in one smooth sweeping motion.

“I said I was right about how little I could trust her.”

There was a moment, frozen in time -- Alex with a fist pulled back, his vision narrowed to Aaron in front of him.

It was at this moment that Hercules Mulligan wrapped his arms around Alex’s body and lifted him off the floor by a full six inches, leaving his legs kicking at the air. “What the fuck, Alex,” Angelica yelled, her sister trailing behind her. “Eliza, you talk to him, I can’t.”

“Put me down and let me finish what he started,” Alexander asked.

Eliza glared.

Alexander, drunk and angry, was not so drunk and angry that he did not recognize a glare that could launch ships. So he didn’t resist when Hercules grabbed his arm and pulled him up the basement stairs and onto the lawn of the Lafayette place.

He lay down on the grass. The world wobbled around him a little less, when he lay down.

“I’m okay,” Alex said.

“Are you telling me that you’re going to go back into that party and not try to inflict bodily harm on Aaron Burr?”

“No, that guy needs to get punched.”

Eliza sad down cross-legged by him, and leaned over his head. “I’m not even going to disagree with you. But I will not let you back into that party unless you promise not to punch Aaron Burr.”

“Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“Alex, you’re going to get expelled.”

“For something that didn’t even happen on school grounds?”

“If they don’t, they’ll take your scholarship. That’s as good as expelling you, unless you can find forty-five thousand in the couch cushions.”

“So I’ll go to public school! All you -- all you rich people think it’s such a horrible fate, going to public school, like there’s not a million kids in this city who can’t drop the price of a BMW on school every year.”

“Okay,” Eliza said quietly. “Look, you know you’re smart. You know you’ll peel knowledge out of every corner of the city no matter what school you go to. But I want you here, Angelica wants you here. You were happier here. You’re really gonna give that up because you want to punch a guy?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “Talking about me like I was trying to get Angelica away from him. Talking about Angelica like she was trying to get something on the side with me.”

“They just broke up yesterday. You can’t expect him to be over it yet.”

“They broke up,” Alex said. Well. That certainly explained some things.

“They had a fight, Ange stormed off -- if it wasn’t official before, it’s definitely official now.”

“Oh.”

“Alexander Hamilton, at a loss for words?”

“I’m trying to decide if I should tell her I’m in love with her and then punch Aaron, or the other way around.”

“Do I need to go get Hercules again?”

Alex shook his head. He liked the swishing sound it made in the grass.

“Wait. I thought you liked John Laurens.”

“I did. That’s kind of how this whole bisexual thing works.”

Alexander could quite precisely read the expression on Eliza’s face, which said: If I hadn’t assumed you were gay I would’ve asked you out already, but I have just successfully avoided any weird love triangle awkwardness with my sister, nice going Eliza.

“Aaron told me something a long time ago, before I even knew how I felt about her. That if I ever tried to get with her, she would know, and her family would know, and everybody at school would know, that I wasn’t interested in anything but your family’s money.”

“I’m gonna punch that jackass for you.”

“All right, let’s do this,” Alex said, but his first attempt at getting up didn’t quite work because the world was still just a little too spinny.

“I wanted to show her,” he went on some time later, when things were more settled in his head, “I could make it on my own, I didn’t need her money. Not because I’m too proud to get help, I just -- needed her to know, that’s not what I liked about her.” He sighed. “She sends me a box of cookies and money for my library fines.”

“No,” Eliza said. “Let me tell you about my sister. My sister is the head of the Alexander Hamilton Fan Club. My sister is the executive director of the Let’s Get Alexander Hamilton A Goddamn College Education Foundation. That’s not her feeling sorry for you, that’s her realizing that you not being able to check out library books is an affront, not just to you, but to the whole future of this country. That’s -- I mean -- that’s what love looks like, when you see somebody and you can see all the things they haven’t done yet, and you want to be the person that helps them get there. And sometimes you can do it, and you’re just grateful that you can.”

Alex finally succeeded in getting up. “I’m not going to punch Aaron Burr,” he said.

“Aaron’s gone,” Angelica said, when Alex had steered his way through the crowd to the corner where she and Peggy had been talking. “He was drunk, I made him get an Uber home. Don’t think I’m not still mad at you.”

She wasn’t. Not really. But sad and scared and frustrated in a way that added up to mad, if you did the math wrong.

Alex handed her a drink, but she waved it off. Peggy looked at them both uncertainly for a moment, then made a convincing show of pretending she saw a friend at the other end of the basement.

“How come you sent your sister after me?”

“Because she’s nicer than I am!” Angelica said -- which was true as far as it went. “Because I can’t deal with this, Alexander. You’ve got everything to lose, and you’re not the only one who’s going to get hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said.

“Okay.”

“I shouldn’t have got into it with him. I -- we -- shouldn’t have ruined this for you.”

She wanted to leave it at that, and she couldn’t. “I wish I could stop caring and say you can destroy yourself if you feel like it. I’m scared, all the time, like I never was before I met you.”

“Well, I’m not.” Angelica was surprised to look up and see Alex genuinely smiling at her. “Have a little faith in me, A-dot-Sky. I never thought I’d have -- this, everything, right here. I’m not used to having something I can hold onto. But let me work it out, instead of trying to big-sister me into some kind of respectability.”

“I can try,” she said, and Alex put his arms around her and for all that she was shaken and angry it was such a relief to have him there, warm and solid. To have a real hug from him and not a cautious shoulder squeeze that attempted to evade Aaron’s jealousy.

“I’m going to run for student council,” Alex said.

She looked up at him, once he pulled away from her -- he had beer and glitter on his suit jacket, and he looked oddly dazed and happy.

“I have to do more than just being angry about everything. I have to figure out how to make a difference.”

“We’ll help,” Angelica said. “All of us. We’ll help make posters, we’ll make T-shirts…” He’d be up against the children of politicians and lawyers and Wall Street guys, and there was a good chance Aaron was going to run just to spite him, but for a moment Angelica could see the campaign with perfect clarity, and couldn’t imagine anyone not getting on board. “The school needs somebody like you.”

“I just had to tell you that,” he said. She loved his face like this: excited and hungry, somebody with a full sense of just how smart and passionate he was and how far it could take him. “Because I really want to kiss you right now, and I was thinking that Weird Nerd Alexander Hamilton doesn’t have much chance with Angelica Schuyler, but Student Council Candidate Alexander Hamilton might.”

Angelica was suddenly aware of the inches between them, the heat of her body that wasn’t just from the lights and the crowd. No hesitation. She placed her hand on the side of his jaw and leaned her face into his and it was every political conversation they’d ever had, the way he knew when to press forward and when to let her catch her breath, the way he was cocky and confident and still able to listen to what her lips, her hands, were telling him. “I’ll take Weird Nerd Alexander Hamilton and Student Council Candidate Alexander Hamilton,” she said in a whisper. “If you’ve got any other Alexander Hamiltons hanging around I’ll take them too.”

He brushed back the dark hair that draped over her shoulder, kissed the side of her neck. She could hear the grin in his voice when he spoke. “Just you wait.”

There was a hush over the car as they drove back to Manhattan, like all the energy of the night had been drained away. Alexander looked out the window as if searching for something Angelica couldn’t see; he held onto her hand, he kept pulling it up to his lips for soft kisses that put Angelica in mind of a hundred different things that they would do when they were not in a small, enclosed space with her two sisters.

She didn’t understand how this was possible -- to love someone so fiercely and also feel this grim certainty that he was going to keep crashing into the world from every angle, that he was going to burn up like a meteor entering the atmosphere, that there was nothing she could do to keep him from harm.

She rested her head on his shoulder, her eyes half-closed, and trembled from the beauty and fearfulness of it. 

**Author's Note:**

> In a [Tumblr post](http://bewareofitalics.tumblr.com/post/132489966433/each-schuyler-sister-played-a-different-musical), BewareOfItalics quotes the Ron Chernow biography and suggests: “Schuyler sisters band AU, anyone?”
> 
> Thanks to [BewareofItalics](http://bewareofitalics.tumblr.com) for the inspiration. 
> 
> Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School was founded as a boys' prep school for Kings College -- the same school Alexander Hamiltoon graduated from.


End file.
